Bombs in the Air

With the explosive growth of air travel in the 1950s, the air industry has worked ceaselessly and effectively to make flying safer. But despite every safety precaution, despite every improvement in equipment and procedure, there remains one peril that is a nightmare to all airline men: the possibility of someone, acting out of dementia, desperation or despair, planting a bomb aboard an airplane. In the past decade at least eight planes around the world have been so sabotaged --and at least 99 people died as a result. Last week U.S. authorities were deep in investigations of two more possible bombings aloft.

"The Richest Woman." Piecing together the fragments of a National Airlines DC-6B that crashed last fortnight, killing 34, in North Carolina (TIME, Jan. 18), Civil Aeronautics Board investigators found strong evidence indicating a bomb explosion inside the plane. The wreckage showed that an 8-ft. section near a forward washroom had been blasted outward, as if by an explosion within the plane. A small blue handbag, its bottom blown out, was found near the crash scene. Searching through the passenger list for a possible suspect, the probers turned up the name of one Julian Andrew Frank, 32.

The reason for the investigators' interest in Frank was the discovery that within two months before the crash he had taken out some $900,000 in life and accident insurance, naming his ex-model wife as beneficiary. And as they looked deeper into Frank's affairs, they found that he might well have reason for wanting to die: he was a young man in trouble.

Handsome, wavy-haired Julian Frank was a lawyer. He lived with his beautiful wife and two small children in exurbanite Westport, Conn., commuted to his small office in Manhattan. Fellow commuters recall that he was a first-rate bridge player but a loud, boastful sort of fellow (says one acquaintance: "He gave me the impression of being a young man in a hurry--ambitious, driving, smart"). Others remember that he often talked of dreaming that he would some day die in a plane crash.

Up to last year, Julian Frank had earned about $10,000 a year. Then he seemed to have struck it rich: he bragged of making $14,000 a month, moved out of his $20,000 home into a $45,000 house, talked almost casually of having "dropped $600,000 in the stock market." He also began taking out his huge insurance policies. "If I die," he told friends, "my wife will be the richest woman in the world."

"Several Thousand Dollars." But Julian Frank had serious problems--and they were closing in on him even as he boarded the Miami-bound National plane that took him to his death. He was being harassed by a bevy of businessmen who claimed he had swindled them. Among the claims: 1) that Frank had operated behind a phony company named J. & P. Factors Inc., whose only address was a mail drop; 2) that he had pocketed $8,025 in fees from a Phoenix firm, then reneged on his promise to raise mortgage money; 3) that he had bilked associates in real-estate deals out of some $40,000; 4) that he had gypped "several thousand dollars" out of businessmen who had retained him to help raise money for some Missouri hospitals. At the time he died, Frank was under investigation by the FBI and the New York District Attorney, and the New York Bar Association was considering disbarment procedures against him.

Lawyer Frank took aboard the National Airlines plane a small blue bag of the sort later found near the crash. His body, washed ashore from the Atlantic at a point about 16 miles from the actual crash scene, was missing a leg and a foot and had been pierced by pieces of metal which, investigators said, did not seem to have been part of the plane itself. Insane as it seemed, if Julian Frank did commit suicide by blowing up himself and his fellow passengers, he had at least a sort of reason: only by making it appear that he had died in an accident and not by suicide could he have hoped that his widow would ever get her insurance money.

"For $500." In the second case under investigation last week, Federal Bureau of Investigation officials, while revealing few details, said they were working on a theory about the crash of a National Airlines DC-7B that went down with 42 aboard in the Gulf of Mexico last November. The theory: that a Dallas naturopath named Robert Spears, 64, possessor of a long police record that included forgery, fraud, armed robbery and a penitentiary term, may have been involved in the crash. Most interesting fact about Spears, whose name appeared on the flight's passenger manifest: the FBI reported that he had once said "that for $500 he would blow up a hospital."

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